Requiem for an Armenian Nuclear Family 1
The Helios Airways flight HCY 522
crashed into a hill north of Athens -
Armenian Cypriot family
perish in air tragedy
gibrahayer.cyprusnewsletter.com e-magazine 14 August 2005
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A roomful of people turning blue
They were not aliens but people of this earth
Not British Conservatives or porno artistes 2
Wholly innocent, on their Augustan holidays
Flying from their sun-soaked country to Homeric Hellas
Over the azure sea-drowned bronzed-up snow-capped Olympus 3
They were turning blue one by one
Mother and child, father and friend alike
Freezing in mid-air
Robbed clean of the priceless gift the ancient gods
Gave mankind soiled by the knowledge of their deaths –
The ignorance of the precise moment of one’s death 4
Of all the earthlings, they alone knew they were going to die now then
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Are you all right Simon, I wrote
Tell me if you were on that plane of aphros-born Kupris 5
Silly question of panic-born moments of loving concern
I knew there were no survivors, as if of a genocide
The news was well-defined and final
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Icarus crashed to the Earth
In the country of his myth
Because he was too ambitious to become the son of Helios 6
The globalised icarus-plane crashed
To gratify its masters’ lust for mammonas, not women
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The froth-born islanders of Aphrodite
Go home to Greece – Aphrodite’s home
To live a bit of joie de vivre
To sweeten the bitter sweat of their toil
By which the Old Testament Lord said they must eat
The crumbs of bread they produce
Pinched by the rich to feed their swine
They pay through their noses not to congeal in mid-air
Simon of Cyprus e-mailed me back he was OK
But mourned for Hakop, Hilda, Ara and Baret …
The friend of a priceless friend is a precious friend indeed
Simon remembered he had danced and sang with Hilda
At the Ham-azkayin Song and Dance ensembles 7
He had played football with Hakop when growing up together
A whole small Armenian quantum family wiped out
A globalised sacrifice to post-modern mad Mammon
The ghosts of Enver and Talaat turning in their graveless holes
Thirsting for sacrificial Armenian blood yet again
When Oh When shall the genocide of the Armenians finally end, Oh Lord
My precious friend Simon mourned his priceless friends
The nicotine-stained bones turned dust of the Young old Turks
Wished to be washed awash with the sweet blood of the Tutundjians 8
Travelling together as a family for the very first time – a lovely loving family
Giving their baby son Ba-ret his first Icarus-ian flight experience …
Wrote Hakop Dikranian in absolute shock and horror
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Those globalised crashing aeroplanes are not air-worthy
Their multinational mafia owners know it well
Their hamburgarized governments know it even better
They all put profits before their people – manna for mammonas
That is the cardinal cardiac law of global Das Kapital 9
Profits are people who do not count as people
But as pawns in a power-game
To pinch and punch your way
Through the wild jungle
Fodder for the trans-national companies’ cash tills
Who cares if they freeze and turn blue above the clouds
Best place to turn blue in the azure-blue of the skies
Said a cynic punter of blue-chips philosophy
Who cares if an oft genocided Armenian quantum family is genocided yet again
The Tutundjians - I knew them not, Horatio 10 until this very day
They took life for me as they lost their lives
Alive to my mind in their deaths, alas, alack
I wish they were alive though dead to me
Cursed be those globalisers who turned them alien blue
For pale green money smeared with famous dead US heads
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Any of the ancient gods luxuriating on Mount Olympus
Could have caused this genocidal deed
Created in our own images
They love and hate and murder
Just like the rest of us on this earth
They are a shameless ruthless bloody bunch
Kill for a few drops of ambrosia
Rape for a honey-sight of heavenly pudenda
Bugger Ganymede to outdo Marquis de Sade 11
But not the Christian mono Theos
He is all aghape love and nothing else
Unlike his mad twin in the Old Testament
Who punishes you for a … smile
If you dared smile when HE would not say so
His Christian twin forgives All all their sins
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O Christian God, my Lord and Creator
If you are or ever were
Could you not have snatched that plane from Satan’s clutches
Why do you wash your hands
Off the hoofed Beast nowadays so very often
Why do you allow his Devils to pace up and down
The corridors and the boardrooms of power
Polluting minds and bodies on this heavenly piece of earth
Turning the innocent masses blue …
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One such tailed and sopranoed US geezer 12
Who touts food on the world’s Airlines
Wastes 10 million US dollars on his birthday
Cavorting with Rolling Stones
But makes his London Asian workers worthless 13
In New Orleans
The poor black men and women
Sang of their miserable loves and life in persecuted poverty
Sank into the petrol black waters of Hades 14
To save their soul
Their unelected president a-bush 15
Who thought the Gulf coast was a Golf course
Of the wealthiest materialist nation on earth
Deprived of all spiritual prosperity
Wished to fund-raise riding on The Red Cross
While wasting the US national chest
To kill the Innocents of Iraq
To rob their country’s black gold
What’s the point of your Being Oh Lord
If such beings should have a point
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Could You not or would You not
For You could if You would
Confirm the faith of Christian Love
And bring the Tutundjians back
From the graveless void
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And Oh God of Love
I would so love to see
My genocided grand parents too returning …
Impossible dreams I know, forgive me O Lord of Miracles ...
Notes
1 Nuclear Family contains a pun on the Bomb, but is also a sociological concept referring to the post-modern Western standard of a heterosexual couple producing 2.5 [Statistical average] children, against the traditional custom of having 5/6 children – a dozen in the Orthodox Jewish family. The nuclear family is also the standard, which replenishes Western capitalist society. There are unspoken Government fears in Britain today (for example) where fertility is falling to 2.1 children, not enough to reproduce the workforce of the future to sustain the present levels of capitalist economic relations, hence the need for… immigration! Multi-culturalism thus is a pressure from the capitalist forces of production, and not a generous humane gift from benign governments…
The equivalence in China is the single-child family – the rigorous practice of which has produced incalculable unintended social consequences, of which there seems to be no acute awareness in the media – for example, the words for family relations (elder brother, younger sister, older sister, younger brother etc.) are foundation stones in the Chinese language, still the first to occur in Chinese-teaching language text-books.
Confucianism, the state-‘religion’ of China throughout the ages, was based on the family hierarchy of many-children headed by the Father, and the eldest son next. Few people stop and think today that incredibly, the present day Chinese have no brothers and sisters to speak of …
2 Blue is the colour famously adopted by the British Conservative Party, hence Mrs Thatcher’s notorious wardrobe in blue… The ladies of the shires in Britain still wear blue dresses in public, if they wish to advertise their Conservative Party loyalties.
Blue blood is a semiotic reference meaning an Aristocrat-by-birth belonging to the landowning classes – to differentiate them from the phoney Lords created by the British government Honours.
Feeling Blue in Jazz discourse means being in a state of depression and hopeless melancholy, caused of course by social factors of poverty, and discriminatory racist deprivation.
Blue (in Art-films, for example) also means sexually explicit pornographic content.
3 Hellas is the name the ancient Greeks gave to their country, still used today.
Of course a Modern Greek would need no help to understand this reference, but one should remember that one’s Internet readership is global, and it is highly unlikely that a Chinese reader of this poem (for example) may capture all its Western classical references - hence the need for occasional explanations of even English elements - one wants to be understood by an international readership.
The ancient Greeks firmly believed that Mount Olympus was where their numerous gods lived, feeding on ambrosia/honey (=the elixir of life, from ambrotos=immortal), under a hierarchy topped by Zeus, their god of gods.
Modern experts always refer to ancient myths as no more than untrue fairy tales – they forget that their creators, ancient peoples believed in them as true stories!
Homer’s narrative poems The Iliad and the Odyssey are the first records of creative literature/poetry in Western History. Some, doubt the very identity of Homer as a single poet – they think ‘he’ may be a label for collective authorship. Some accept Homer’s single identity, and authorship of The Iliad, but doubt his authorship of the Odyssey etc.
What is undoubted is the progeny of the poems from Asia Minor – I would say ancient Armenia.
Characteristic of his poetic craft is the adjectival multiple-words formation – the wine-coloured sea, the rosy-fingered dawn – imitated among others by Shakespeare, and typical of e.g. scholarly German.
4 In ancient myth, there was a belief that the first mankind’s lot was so wretched, that they even knew the exact time of their deaths …
The gods took pity on them, and one of the first divine gifts they gave mankind was to take away that knowledge, gift them with the ignorance of the precise moment of their death – thenceforth releasing human creativity as a means of acquiring immortality… viz. it is the ignorance of one’s moment of death that gives impetus to one’s creative life!
The debilitating fear of death contained within the knowledge of one’s day of dying kills the soul, they thought. This divine spiritual gift – the ignorance of one’s death-day, preceded the other most precious technological gift of the Fire, the knowledge of which the Titan-god Prometheus had to steal from the god of gods Zeus, and suffer the latter’s eternal punishment chained on the mountains of Caucasus (in present day Armenia). An Armenian species of an Eagle gnaws daily on Prometheus’ liver, which grows back daily, eternally… giving the Titanic god no peace – the bad luck of the Armenian people suffering massive earthquakes.
5 Simon Aynedjian, Publisher and Editor of GIBRAHAYER, universally admired and loved, almost adored ... like an ancient god of wisdom, by its readership.
Kupris = Cyprus, now the name of the island, was in fact an ancient name for Aphrodite, the goddess of female beauty and sexuality.
The irony was that this most beautiful ‘woman’ was married off to Hephaistos, the ugliest crippled god of Olympus, who alone of all the gods did not live there, but had to create his workshops under the volcanic mountains – for he also was the most artistically creative of all the gods – he provided them with their jewellery…
Hephaistos symbolizes the mysterious, rationally inexplicable and shockingly contradictory, but dialectical processes in Nature, and human relationships – many are the men (and women) married to ‘ugly’ women (and men)… Physically crippled, he possessed a creatively beautiful mind - he would have been murdered by the proto-Nazi British imperialist Social Darwinists and the US Eugenicists.
The etymology of the name Aphrodite means froth-given or born.
She was born out of the froth created in the sea when the son (Zeus, the supreme god of the New gods) of Kronos (the supreme god of the Old gods – the Titans) castrated his father, upon the egging of his mother Gaia=Earth, who was fed up with the habit of her husband swallowing up every male-child she bore him, having heard a prophesy that his son would be greater than him!
Zeus threw his Dad’s massive (titanic!) genitals into the sea … It became the island of Cyprus itself, where in ancient times was found the most famous brothel of antiquity sacred to Aphrodite – the other was found on the mainland of Greece, on the Acropolis of the city-state of Corinth.
The archaeological evidence indicates that the Cypriot Aphrodite had a … moustache, sometimes also a beard – obviously an acknowledgment of the hairy female in the Mediterranean and the Indian subcontinents, and not evidence of homosexual androgyny, as is generally thought.
6 Icarus expresses first man’s first desire to join the birds in the sky, finally realized in the 20th c., and made dangerous by the capitalist greed of the airline companies.
A feeling of fellowship with the avian population on the other hand (very much so in the famous classical Greek Comedy The Birds by Aristophanes) may even be indicative of an evolutionary link between the species.
Helios, the name of a god (literally meaning the word Sun) was sculpted as the Colossus of the island of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world.
The sun-cult is undoubtedly the very first and universal religion of mankind – the archaeological record globally has unearthed evidence of sun-worship all over the world – from China to Africa (Ethiopia and ancient Egypt) to South America via ancient Armenia – the multi-cultural, multi-ethnic cross road of the ancient world, joining up Asia with Europe.
By the classical times, sun-worship had already eroded and drowned to insignificance within the matrix of multi-god theocracy – the overall massive single cult was reduced to individual minor sun-gods, still regarded as the most ancient among the others – for example, the Ra of ancient Egypt – all the other gods including the Pharaohs were regarded as his children.
The original Sun-cult was by definition monotheistic – its birthplace a mystery. Its historical and most notorious revival by Akhnaten in ancient Egypt (against the polytheism of his day) provoked a massive socio-political revolution. Akhnaten’s motivation and inspiration is one of the great puzzles of ancient History.
The clue I think lies in the fact that he was married to Nefertiti, a Hittite princess from ancient Armenia (sited in the region of Van, around the mountains of Ararat), who I think had brought the original cult down to Egypt with her dowry as it were, all of which suggests that the birthplace of mankind’s very first religion was indeed pre-historical Armenia, and the cult-object was the very Ararat mountains, re-fashioned into the Pyramids of Egypt – the number one wonder of the world, otherwise wholly inexplicable in both architectural and religious concepts, in view of the well-established fact of their linkage with sun-worship.
Ra the name of the Egyptian sun-god, is indeed the Semitic variant/reversal of the Indo-European Ar – the Armenian root of the word for sun=ar(e)-k.
7 Hamazkayin=pan-National is the name of an Armenian cultural organization with dynamic branches in several Armenian Diaspora communities – ham=pan- is a prefix in Armenian, here used as a pun on the root of the word ham-ov=tasty…
8 In most Medieval cultures, surnames arose frequently from people’s occupations, a habit still active in early 20th c.
A lot of Armenian surnames in the Ottoman Empire originated from Turkish words – tutun=nicotine/cigarette (tutundji=cigarette seller) linkage was obviously the etymological meaning of the Tutundjian family’s surname.
Enver with Talaat and Djemal formed the ruling triumvirate of the Young Turk political party that toppled Sultan Hamit, only to adopt his policies against the Armenians. Finally, at the start of the First World War, in 1915, with Germany behind them, they thought they could genocide 2 million Armenians out of their historical lands in Anatolia at the heart of the Ottoman Empire.
They succeeded in killing 1.5 million, and leaving the legacy of their genocidal techniques to the Nazis for effective use upon the Jews…
Half a million Armenians were saved miraculously (among them my very own father and mother - Israel and Tefarik - within the Arab countries of the Middle East, and radiated out into the rest of the world.
9 Even rabid anti-Marxists cannot deny that Karl Marx’s masterpiece is one of the great books of all time – ironically, it defined the modern capitalist system with such clarity and finality as to leave the capitalist system in its debt for as long as it shall exist.
Karl Marx single-handedly, and very ironically, almost created (while condemning it) the Capitalist system and its inhumane market practices, as we know it today…
10 Shakespeare’s Hamlet’s stoic friend, Horatio characterizes Roman Ciceronian type rationality, with enough empathy and compassion to be Hamlet’s loyal friend and confidant.
Shakespeare had transformed completely the character of his source material, the Roman Horatius, who was a warlike figure, killed his own sister in front of his army, because she was in love and crying in public for the murder of one of the three Alban brothers by Horatius…
11 Zeus, the god of gods, had to be all things to all men – while mostly a lover of women, he was also a homosexual paedophile.
He fell in love with a young prince called Ganymede, snatched him away to Olympus, turned him into his personal private cup-bearer!
The myth is full of homosexual symbolism and was used as such by the Renaissance artists – originally, obviously the myth mourned the passing away of an aristocratic child in mysterious circumstances.
There is a profoundly disturbing Rembrandt painting (not commonly understood or published) of an infant Ganymede, terrified in the clutches of a massive Eagle.
Zeus seduced his lovers assuming different shapes – from animal forms, as a Swan for Leda, to a mere ray of light (an expression of sun-cult), as a shower of gold for Semele, the mother of god Dionysus.
In Rembrandt's painiting of the paediphiliac abduction, urine drips down the frightened infant's angelic chubby legs … If anything could condemn the horrendous crime of paedophelia, Rembrandt’s said painting could – it should hang in every Catholic priory, including the Vatican, as the latter tried and thank God failed to cover-up the massive scale of child-abuse in the Catholic world.
12 A recent TV series much admired in Anglo-America is The Sopranos – about the American Mafia, brutally but with … great charm and warmth massacring its way in at least New York.
The US news media in cahoots with the series' Producers seem intent on rendering blatantly, up-front the murderous socio-economic cancer acceptable, almost desirable!
13 From The Independent, London newspaper, 13 August 2005, p. 6;
‘Sacked staff wonder how they will pay the bills, Meanwhile, their boss spends $10m on his birthday party’ by Rachel Stevenson - “With the reported $10m David Bonderman, the American financial tycoon whose business owns the Gate Gourmet catering company, spent on his 60th birthday party, he could have paid a fair chunk of the wages of the 650 Gourmet workers who lost their jobs this week.”
14 Hades was the name of the place, and that of the god itself, of the Underworld, which was not a place of punishment as is the case of the Christian Hell.
Hades abducted Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, one of the most important goddesses of land-fertility and its crops.
A universal famine was avoided when Zeus himself interfered and negotiated a civilized settlement (the first of its kind in Greek mythology) to allow Persephone to visit her mother above ground for six months of the year, before spending the other six months under the ground with her husband, in the Hades.
15 In the Armenian language, abush=stupid.
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Explore further Professor H.I. Pilikian's other websites; http://godsavehugochavez.blogspot.com/
http://exciting-sculptures-by-pilikian.blogspot.com/
http://exceptional-films.blogspot.com/
http://exceptional-music-concerts.blogspot.com/
